A king cut down to size (THE TYRANNICIDE BRIEF by Geoffrey Robertson)

[struggle4progress]

THE TIME HAS COME TO TALK of English liberty — of Magna Carta and the abolition of Star Chamber, of Milton and free speech. When politicians threaten to detain suspects without trial and to jail radical preachers and to put pressure on judges, it is worth recalling how their forebears fought against these very abuses of power. Liberty does not date from the adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights. On the contrary, it was forged in the crucible of a civil war that cost one Englishman in ten his life, culminating in the trial for tyranny of a head of state who intimidated judges and refused political or religious freedom.

English historians have been unnecessarily queasy about the trial and execution of Charles I, the momentous event that ended absolutism and can now be seen as the precursor of proceedings against rulers such as Pinochet, Milosevic and Saddam who make war on their own people. Although we prefer to teach our children history through the indulged lives of kings and queens, it was the republicans who achieved the rights that Western democracies now insist are universal. These Puritans, with their fused passions for liberty and God, first established representative government. They understood — rather more clearly than Charles Clarke or Hazel Blears — that the precondition of parliamentary sovereignty is that all legislation must conform with rights declared and enforced by judges who are free from political pressure.

Magna Carta was reinvented in 1628 as the Petition of Right — Parliament’s first attempt to limit Stuart absolutism. Charles I ignored it and his lickspittle judges, who held office “at the King’s pleasure”, defied habeas corpus by leaving Sir John Eliot MP to die in the Tower. The Star Chamber — an arm of the executive — jailed Presbyterian preachers for sedition. In the ship money case, a majority of the judges decided that a tax could be imposed without parliamentary approval. “Rex is lex,” they ruled: the king was above the law and could dispense with fundamental rights whenever, in his subjective judgment, national security demanded.

These were some of the events that provoked the Civil War, fought from 1642 to 1648, and still enthusiastically re-enacted in muddy fields every summer. Parliament reversed the decision, abolished the Star Chamber and determined that judges should hold office for life, subject only to good behaviour. But these great constitutional reforms were in jeopardy so long as Charles I remained head of state, actively planning a third war from his confinement at Carisbrooke Castle. So the army leaders and the independent group of MPs moved against the appeasers in Parliament and brought the King to trial. <snip>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1814272,00.html